Well Born: An Idea Arrives
The Black Stork Part 2: The Dawn of a Medical Philosophy
Dr.Harry J.Haiselden liked playing both God and a movie star. Successful at both, this doctor of death in 1915 helped usher in the first major American wave of this new medical idea of Eugenics.
Using his standard for a “fit” life, Dr. Haiselden would let viable infants die before his eyes to “protect” society from what he and others espoused as “defective”. His subsequent wealth and fame were built off of two interlocking narratives: The “Evil” Black Mother and the “Genetically Inferior” Child.
In the years 1915 to 1918, Dr. Haiselden openly killed five other babies, and encouraged other pediatricians and parents to kill their children who did not live up to the “Standard”.
Where did his “Standard” stem from? And what made-up ideas of class and race fed into that?
Charles Darwin had a cousin named Francis Galton. Galton was the one who coined the term “eugenic”, after the Greek word eugenes which meant “well-born”.
This word came about in the 20th century, and along with it, this medical philosophy that society’s dysfunction could be corrected with regulated, intentional procreation started to rise. Long before that, from 1857 to 1864, monk and biologist Gregor Mendel made some famous discoveries with his pea plants. He realized there were patterns of inheritance that contradicted the ideas of heredity at the time. Scientists originally believed that offspring were a diluted blend of both parents. Mendel realized that the offspring carried dominant and recessive traits. A plant could have the genetic information for two traits but only express one in the first generation, and express the other in the second generation under different circumstances. From 1900 to 1910, Geneticists looked at patterns of inheritance in humans and found that this was also the case for people. A brown-eyed child could carry a recessive gene for a different eye color that would be passed down in the future to their offspring. Different diseases from unaffected parents could show up in an affected child. Seeing people as “carriers” of traits (good or bad) changed how people viewed their biological connection to each other. No longer were parents of a “bad” child simply “innocent” bystanders in a tragedy, but “defective” carriers who passed on destructive genes. Similarly, parents with “perfect” children weren’t simply “blessed”, but two people of “good stock” who responsibly procreated.
But back to the two social narratives we started with: Prior to this understanding of human genetics, there was this cultural idea that Black mothers were simply bad mothers. This idea and stereotype were the result of a couple of factors.
The reality is that when women from various countries of the continent of Africa were forcibly taken and enslaved by people of various European descent, they lost more than their countries. They lost their tribes, their language, their homes, their families, and their identity. That last part is critical. If you are enslaving a large group of people across cultures, you need them to work together. If you want to count them as property under the census, you need them to be one homogeneous category. If you need an excuse to justify the brutality you will inflict on them to keep them enslaved, you will invent a story about who they are and what their value is. And that is exactly what happened. People of European descent claimed that people of African descent were all “Black”. They claimed that the reason there were so many babies from these women with European fathers was because the women were sluts and insatiable. They hoped people would buy that story, and not the obvious one that enslavers raping their “property” allowed them to produce more “property” and these rapes conveniently were timed with various degrees of access to the human trafficking market that slavery was. The very people who made it economically, socially, and politically impossible for families deemed Black to stay together as a unit blamed the Black family instead. Poor nutrition, no access to healthcare, limited education, endless ethnic terrorism, sexual assault, lack of housing, segregated housing, and no political agency meant that families under the Black label struggled to provide safe, healthy environments for their children. The ones that did faced intense discrimination and had to climb mountains to do so. And in a patriarchal society, blaming men of European descent for their actions wouldn’t fly, so in a tale as old as time, women were blamed for their crimes. Add in all the fake science about how inherently bad it was to be “Black” and you have a trope wielded against a certain group of mothers that shielded the larger system of oppression from critique.
The inferiority lie that justified the brutal enslavement of an entire group of people was a lie in search of “proof” for generations before genetics was discovered. It also mixed with a glaring oversight. Scientists (as Washington brilliantly notes) constantly confused class and race privileges with biological, hereditary concepts. If you live in a society where you socially constructed place in it and identity give you access to better food, housing, education, and healthcare, you will have a better, healthier life. If your socially constructed identity and place in society bar you from those things, naturally you will have a harder time staying healthy.
Highly educated, wealthier people were considered biologically superior to less educated, poorer people. This oversight - at any point in genetic understanding- was very bad science. And it was not something anyone needed more time or information to figure out. It was a choice. Just like it was a choice to take real, tested information about genetics and force it to affirm a social narrative of race and class. The dawn of genetics didn’t birth classist and racist myths because it proved anything. The field of genetics was used to retroactively “prove” extremely tired, old myths that were socially convenient for people with power.
Eugenics was weaponized to claim that African American women were “destined” to give birth to children who were “defective”. The eugenic standard suspiciously upheld traits of the wealthy and those deemed White as the pinnacle of health and everyone and anything else as “undesirable”. Washington writes that even a brief look at the diagrams, charts, and photographs shows that anything outside of an Anglo-Saxon norm was denigrated with no real genetic reason. There was also this idea that only able-bodied people deserved to exist! Various prejudices against disabled people, non-Europeans, and the lower classes were coded into this pseudo-science.
These age-old prejudices and the new genetic science are the critical contexts in which to understand the following immigration policies, birth control battles, and even genocides (at home in the states and abroad) that would come. This history, of particular people who were erroneously maligned, matters. We are typically taught a history of The State. That is the history of our political state (our country and the political power it wields), and not the history of the people within it. The history of the State will mention and note the wars, the genocides, the displacements, and the movements of society. The history of the State is often taught as some inevitable march to glory, an account of how the State -still standing- overcame all. The rise of the Nazis wasn’t inevitable, the enslavement of Africans wasn’t necessary, and the oppression of women wasn’t natural. These events were the results of human ideas and human stories that impacted choices about power, money, land, bodies, and resources. And the historical events all started with narratives. In this chapter and the coming chapters of Medical Apartheid, those events are understood in the context of the eugenic narrative. Today’s continued bias against disabled and lower-class people can be traced and understood through it. Some find this depressing, but in my writing, I am finding it to be somewhat bonding. We are all far more interconnected than we could have ever imagined. Our issues, our struggles, and our pain are interwoven together. And that flies directly in the face of any lie that says we stand alone. Now who does that story benefit?